


everything changes when the sun goes down (i'm not afraid)

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreams, F/M, Minor Will Daniels/Jemma Simmons, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-26 17:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18183812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: This isn't how Jemma's dreams about Ward usually go.





	everything changes when the sun goes down (i'm not afraid)

**Author's Note:**

> What's this? No writing for two months and then two fics in a WEEK?
> 
> I don't even know, guys, the muse does what the muse does. And this fic is....ridiculously long. I'm so sorry.
> 
> Thanks for reading and please be gentle (or genteel, which I typed first) if you review! <3

It’s not unusual for Jemma to recognize when she’s dreaming. A side effect of her genius, perhaps, that her mind works too quickly even for her own subconscious to keep up with.

Nightmares do tend to trick her, catch her up in the horror of drowning or falling or facing—well, various things—and keep her too frightened to think, but dreams she often spots at once.

And this is most certainly a dream.

She’s in a lovely kitchen: cozy without being cramped, cheerfully decorated, with large picture windows that allow the golden light of the rising sun to spill over terracotta tile and simple white cabinets. There’s a vase of flowers on the kitchen table and a little potted succulent on the sill of the window above the sink.

It is, in a word, homey—and that’s what tips her off to the fact that she’s dreaming, because Grant Ward is the last person she’d expect to find in such an idyllic setting.

“Well,” she says, entirely without meaning to. “This is…different.”

Ward doesn’t look at her. He’s slumped at the kitchen table, looking oddly familiar in grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt; it could be any morning on the Bus, were it not for the collection of beer bottles in front of him.

“Is it?” he asks, taking a swig from one.

“Very.” She touches one of the magnets cluttering the refrigerator, a little plastic flip flop, and experiences a strange pang of longing.

It doesn’t make any sense—but then, she is dreaming, after all.

“How’s that?” Ward asks, without interest. She might’ve expected him to be mocking—he often is, when he stars in her nightmares—but he actually sounds…wooden. Dull.

Precisely how Jemma would sound, in fact, if she weren’t putting so much effort into appearing unaffected for her friends. Is her subconscious trying to tell her something? That hiding her feelings will, what, turn her into Ward? Lead her into mass murder and _Hydra_?

Absurd.

“This isn’t how the dreams you feature in usually go,” she says, shaking off such thoughts. It’s just a dream; it doesn’t have to mean anything.

Finally Ward turns to look at her—to _truly_ look at her, giving her a slow once-over that she feels nearly like a physical touch. “Yeah. Likewise.”

“Ew,” she says, entirely reflexively—and then the lascivious tone registers, and she has to shudder. “ _Ew_.”

Maybe she spoke too soon; Ward making reference to having _erotic dreams_ about her is certainly enough to qualify this as a nightmare.

She’s still grimacing when she wakes.

 

…

 

Three nights later, she dreams of him again. The same kitchen, the same sunrise, the same man sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly out the same window above the sink, even though he has such lovely picture windows behind him.

She’s spent the last two nights caught up in horrid nightmares, one of which involved this very man. But even in her sleep, she’s exhausted, and he’s not real. There’s no cause to be afraid, not tonight.

Still, the memory of Ward chasing her down the slopes of her own personal hell is fresh enough that her exhaustion can be the only reason she crosses the kitchen and takes a seat on the other side of the table. It means having to look at his hateful face, unfortunately, but the windows behind him are worth the view. Outside is a tiny backyard and an even smaller garden, both gorgeous in the light of the rising sun.

“I suppose that explains it,” she muses.

“Explains what?” Ward asks, voice just as dull as last time.

“The dream,” she says, propping her chin on one hand as she studies what she can make out of the garden. The _Dahlia coccinea_ are blooming very nicely. “It’s everything I want—almost.”

The house with the garden and the sunrise and even the lovely little kitchen—it’s all perfect. A beautiful dream of the domesticity she spent months longing for. The only thing out of place is Ward…but then, if the man she _actually_ wanted to share such idle bliss with were present, this really would turn into a nightmare.

She supposes it’s kind of her subconscious to spare her, even as she aches with the truth of it.

“Yeah.” Ward finishes off his beer, shoves the empty bottle aside, and picks up another. “Almost.”

Even knowing that it’s a dream (and that Ward is an unrepentant murderer and traitor, besides), Jemma can’t help a little bit of judgment as she surveys his collection of empty bottles. “Long day?”

“Long life,” he mutters.

His desolate tone sparks something inside of her—a little flicker of anger, as deadened as everything else she’s been feeling lately, but it’s _something_. Something more than despair and longing.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” she asks, dredging up a spiteful tone in the hopes of nurturing that flicker. “Did one of your victims get blood on your favorite jacket? Someone you betrayed call you a mean name? Perhaps you kidnapped a woman and she had the gall to be angry—”

“The woman I love is _dead_ ,” Ward snaps, and it hits her like a punch to the solar plexus, knocking all the air out of her. She can’t even be bothered that he’s on his feet, looming like he did in the wake of the berserker staff.

“Oh,” she says, softly, and tries desperately to swallow back her tears—but then, it’s a dream. What’s the harm in crying in a dream?

She knows the harm. Once she starts crying, she’ll never stop.

So she takes slow, deep breaths, fighting back the rising tide of misery, reminding herself that he wouldn’t want it, he’d want her to be _happy_ , to move on with Fitz, to smile and live for him—but just like when she’s awake, each reminder seems to double rather than quell her misery.

He _wouldn’t want her to cry_ , and yet one tear slips through, and then another, and then she’s burying her face in her hands like hiding the tears will make them less of a betrayal of his wishes.

There’s no stopping her tears once she starts. She wakes to swollen eyes and wet cheeks.

 

…

 

Several nights later, Ward saying “Those tears weren’t for me,” is her introduction back into the dream. Same kitchen. Same table. Her cheeks are still wet from a days-old crying jag.

Jemma lifts her head, breathes deep, and wipes the tears away. “No. They weren’t.”

“Uh huh.” He surveys her over the rim of his bottle—still the same one, she supposes. “Where’ve you been?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“My little team-up with SHIELD back in April,” he says. “You weren’t there—and I got some pretty nasty looks when I asked after you. So. Where were you?”

She has to take a moment to marvel at the question. The team told her about having to work with Ward, of course—and how he repaid their generosity in letting him walk away by torturing poor Bobbi—but it never consciously occurred to her, in her disinterest, that he might’ve wondered at her absence.

How hard her subconscious works at making her dreams seem real. If only it put less effort into her nightmares.

“Hell,” she says, seeing no reason to lie to herself.

Ward chokes on his beer. “What.”

“Well, technically it was another planet.” She looks down at the table, traces a little pattern in the grain of the wood…realizes she’s tracing the path from the caves to the pond, and folds her hands instead. “I fell afoul of an 084. It took me across the universe.” She lifts her eyes to regard the still-rising sun; she doesn’t believe it’s moved at all over the past three dreams. “But it felt like hell. There was no sun, hardly any food, and only one source of water.”

“Aliens?” he asks, studying her with unnerving intensity. “Humans?”

“Just one,” she says, before honesty compels her to admit, “Of each.”

It’s more than she’s told the team—but then, the team hardly needs to know, do they?

“And let me guess,” he says, reaching for another bottle. She grasps for the judgment she felt before, for the spark of anger, but both fail to appear. There’s only the usual pit in her stomach, grief and guilt and endless misery. “You fell in love with one of ’em.”

“Yes,” she—croaks, really. “The human.”

She can’t say his name. She can’t even _think_ it. It simply hurts too much.

“And he died,” Ward says.

“Protecting me,” she confirms. Tears spill over again; she ignores them. “From the alien.”

He nods thoughtfully. “I gotta stop drinking before bed. This is a fucking weird dream.”

“Yes,” Jemma agrees. “My subconscious choosing to displace my grief onto _you_ , of all people, is certainly bizarre.”

Ward laughs under his breath and then, to her surprise, slides one of the few still-full beers across the table to her.

“Have a drink, Simmons,” he invites. “You look like you could use it.”

She’s been thinking the same, actually—but Lincoln says it will be some time before she’s recovered enough from her months of malnutrition to handle alcohol. A beer in a dream is as close as she’ll be getting for a while.

“Why not,” she says, and tips it back.

It tastes like the Academy—like the swill some of the more chemistry-minded cadets used to brew in the Boiler Room. Jemma always thought she could do better, but never quite found the time; now, she finds she enjoys it, that the nostalgia warms her in a way few other things have since her return.

She’s still warm when she wakes—peacefully, for the first time since…well. Since.

 

…

 

Her next dream of Ward comes four nights later, and it leaves her shaken. It seems they spend hours sitting in that kitchen, drinking and trading facts about their lost loves—he liked cheeseburgers, she enjoyed soap operas, he was resigned to his fate, she was lost and insecure—under the light of the frozen sunrise.

It’s too much like friendship, like _bonding_ , and even knowing it’s not real, Jemma’s unsettled by it—by the implication that she’s subconsciously softening towards her team’s personal boogeyman.

To say nothing of the lingering question of just _why_ she keeps dreaming about him so softly. Perhaps it’s her subconscious’ attempt to push her to accept Fitz’s offered comfort, some part of her hoping to scare herself into compliance by offering a far worse source.

Jemma doesn’t know precisely what it says about her that she’d rather Ward, but whatever it is, she doesn’t like it.

As such, she’s almost relieved when, the day before another dream, Ward—the _real_ Ward—nearly kills Andrew.

 _Almost_.

 

…

 

When she finds herself back in the kitchen, pettily, she can’t resist the urge to throw the first thing that comes to hand at him.

Ward deflects the empty bottle, because of course he does, and scowls at her. “What was that for?”

“You tried to kill Andrew, you—you _prat_!” she snaps.

“Tried?” he echoes, taking issue with the absolute wrong part of the sentence (of course. She doesn’t know what she was expecting). “What do you mean _tried_? Is he not really dead?”

“He survived,” she says. “No thanks to _you_.” There’s a bowl of peanuts at her elbow—it wasn’t there before, but she’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth—and she starts throwing them at him one by one. (The bowl would be more satisfying, but over far too quickly with.) “What—has—Andrew— _ever_ —done—to—you?”

“Can—stop that,” Ward says, and reaches across to snag the bowl before she can pull it out of his reach. “Can you think of a better way to hurt May?”

Jemma is forced to admit that he has a point; May is quietly devastated and not-so-quietly enraged. Still—

“That doesn’t make it right,” she says.

“Sure it does,” Ward shrugs, lounging back in his seat. “May hurt me, so I hurt her. Fair’s fair.”

He’s so casual about it—which he would be even in real life. Jemma doesn’t know why it upsets her so. Ward is _evil_. He’s a traitor, a murderer, not just a Hydra _agent_ but Hydra’s newest _head_. There is no reason on Earth or any other planet that she should be shocked and even _less_ reason that she should be _hurt_ by his attitude.

“You think that’s fair?” she demands. “Making May feel what we’re feeling?”

His face darkens so swiftly that it raises the hair on the back of Jemma’s neck. “Don’t go there.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she asks. “Tell me why it’s fair—or what was so fair about you _torturing Bobbi_.”

She doesn’t know why she asks, what her subconscious could possibly hope to offer on this score, but once it’s said, it’s said, and Ward is on his feet.

“ _Bobbi_ ,” he all but snarls as Jemma scrambles to her own, “got Kara _brainwashed_.”

Kara’s not a name she’s heard before—but Ward told her in the last dream how his dead love was brainwashed, so it’s not difficult to connect the dots.

Still. It’s absurd. “And how did she manage that? Are you going to tell me she held a gun to Whitehall’s—”

“She gave up Kara’s safehouse,” he bites out, and somehow his face darkens even further. “Protecting _you_.”

That sets Jemma back on her heels—but only for a moment. This is just a dream, and Bobbi would _never_ do something so horrible. There’s no cause to even address it.

“And what did _I_ do?” she asks instead…and has the pleasure of seeing Ward falter.

“What?”

“What did I do?” she repeats. In the way of dreams, the table is suddenly gone from between them; they’re standing toe to toe now. “You dropped me out of the Bus in the bloody _medpod_. I’m terrified of heights, as you well know, so tell me, Ward: what did I do that was so awful you needed to nearly kill me using my worst fear? What made _that_ fair?”

His jaw shifts in a way that suggests he’s grinding his teeth. “I never said it was.”

“I had to swim _ninety feet up_ ,” she says, pairing each word with a firm prod to his chest, “dragging Fitz behind me, desperately trying to reach the surface before we both drowned—and even _then_ , we were stuck in the middle of the ocean with no team to call for a SHIELD rescue boat. What did I do, Ward? How did I _earn_ that?”

“I was trying to save you—”

“You _traumatized_ me!” she shouts over him, almost enjoying the wild fury that’s taken over her. For once, she’s not being smothered under the weight of despair; anger at him burns hot in her veins, enough to set them both aflame. “Most mornings it was all I could do to _shower_! I couldn’t even set foot in the Bus afterwards! To say nothing of F—”

Suddenly, he’s kissing her—a harsh, biting thing, meant to punish more than please. His hands are in her hair, his body firm against hers, and despite the beer he’s been drinking for the past five dreams, he tastes sweet. In fact, he tastes like the wildflower honey Hunter passed her over the kitchen counter as they were making tea this morning.

She is being _kissed_ by the man who tortured and nearly killed Hunter’s ex-wife…except no, she isn’t. She’s being kissed by a dream—by her own subconscious. She’s essentially kissing herself.

Still, she should stop it. No good can come of this, of imagining intimate contact with Ward.

Except it can, because she’s _feeling_. She was angry before, and that was lovely in its own way, but this—this _passion_ , this _want_ , it takes over and sweeps everything aside, all her memories and regrets gone like so much smoke.

How could she stand to stop this? To give that up?

So she fists her hands in his shirt, pulls herself up to ease the angle, and kisses him back. Once, twice, three times—and then for the first time, the kitchen is gone, and they’re in a bedroom, and there’s a bed, and—

The force of her orgasm wakes her. She’s sweaty, trembling, and, if the ache in it is any indication, has been biting her lower lip in her sleep.

She should be horrified. She should be _disgusted_. She should be running to the shower right this instant to try and wash away the memory of Ward’s hands on her skin and his skin under her tongue and his tongue between her thighs.

She should be up and running from what should’ve been a nightmare.

Instead she rolls over and tries to will herself back into the dream.

 

…

 

She doesn’t manage it then, but the next night she’s back in that bedroom—a hotel room, she has time now to register. It’s vaguely familiar; she thinks it might be a hotel they stayed in during their Bus days.

That’s only a passing thought, though, before she’s lost in a flood of pleasure brought on by the very interesting things Ward’s fingers are doing.

 

…

 

It happens again two nights later.

 

…

 

As far as coping mechanisms go, dreaming about sex with the head of Hydra is far from the worst thing Jemma could be doing. She still feels vaguely guilty about it, of course, but really—she _could_ be drugging herself into oblivion every night. The occasional erotic dream is harmless in comparison.

Or so she thinks until a passing comment from Sk—from Daisy sets her world to spinning.

“What was that?” Jemma asks, a bit breathlessly.

“Simmons!” Daisy startles, fumbling for the remote. “Sorry, I didn’t see you come in—”

“No, it’s all right, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she says. It’s a monumental effort that keeps her voice steady. “It’s just—what were you saying about Ward?”

Daisy hesitates, which is par for the course, really. All of the team have been treating her delicately since her return, always so careful not to upset her. It’s only because she literally witnessed Andrew being wheeled in on a stretcher that she found out what happened to him—she can only imagine what she _hasn’t_ discovered by chance.

“Please,” she says when the silence draws out. “I’ll have to return to the world sooner or later, Daisy. I’d like to know what happened.”

That seems to decide her. “Don’t worry, nothing happened. Nothing big, at least. The news was just doing a report on Hydra’s resurgence—it pissed me off, that’s all.”

“But you mentioned Ward,” Jemma presses, heart in her throat. She can’t have heard what she thought she did. She simply—she can’t have.

“It wasn’t anything big,” Daisy says again. “I was just saying it’s pretty sick that Ward’s response to his girlfriend’s death was to build back up the organization that brainwashed her, that’s all. Nothing happened, I promise.”

The world wavers beneath Jemma’s feet.

“Girlfriend?” she asks. If it comes out a bit faint, Daisy doesn’t seem to notice.

“Oh yeah, you missed all that, didn’t you?” Daisy rolls her eyes expressively. “You remember Agent 33?”

Jemma’s blood runs cold. “The one who took May’s face?”

“That’s the one,” Daisy confirms. “Well, somehow she and Ward ended up together. I guess he helped her break her Hydra programming—and then _reprogrammed_ her to think she was in love with him, poor woman.” She makes a face, eloquently expressing what she thinks of that. “Then she died in the op where May and Hunter rescued Bobbi from him, and he went right back to Hydra. So much for love.”

Jemma must say something to that—something convincingly nonchalant—because Daisy doesn’t appear concerned and doesn’t stand to follow her out when she flees the lounge. _What_ she says, she truly has no idea; her mind is several miles away…or, if one is to be precise, several _dreams_ away.

_“It could possess people,” she told Ward that night—that dream they spent just trading facts and tragedies. “After it killed him, it took his body, and it used his face and his voice to—to torment me. It told me it wanted me to be happy, to find a way home. To be with Fitz. For weeks, I couldn’t leave the caves without it showing up to pretend to be him.”_

_Ward slumped back in his chair. “She had a photostatic veil—a broken one, stuck on May’s face. After we got it fixed, before we found out who she really was, she kept picking up different faces, trying to choose the one she liked best. Now every time I see a woman with dark hair, about her height, just for a second, I think…”_

_He trailed off, and they sat there in silence and shared misery._

_It took Jemma several minutes to realize they were holding hands on the table. She had no idea when that had happened._

If that was true—

No. No, it’s coincidence. It has to be. Somehow she heard about Ward and Agent 33, heard it without truly processing it, and it sank into her subconscious and surfaced for a dream. That’s all.

In fact…yes. Yes, that’s it exactly. Those first few days back from the other planet, when she was half-feral with grief and fury, too lost in her isolation and misery to really process that she’d made it home, Fitz spent hours sitting outside her containment pod, just talking to her. She doesn’t remember anything he said, really, just the sound of his voice, anchoring her in the moment.

He must’ve told her about Ward and Agent 33. He _must_ have. It’s the only explanation.

 

…

 

But now that she has reason to wonder, she’s haunted by the possibility. It doesn’t surprise her as much as it should that the next time she dreams of Ward, they’re back in the kitchen.

It seems to surprise him, though. “What gives?”

No. No, it doesn’t surprise him. He is a _figment of her imagination_ , a _dream_ , a distraction her subconscious has gifted her—just a little break from the endless nightmares about the man she loves and the monster that used his face to torture her.

That’s all.

Nothing more.

And yet, she can’t help but ask, “How did you meet her?”

“What?” Ward—her _dream_ —seems taken aback, playful annoyance at finding them in the kitchen instead of a bedroom replaced by real surprise.

“Kara,” Jemma specifies impatiently. “How did you meet Kara?”

He blows out a slow breath. “If this is me punishing myself for dreaming about sex with another woman—”

Why would her dream think he was dreaming?

Because he’s a dream, that’s all. That _has_ to be all. “Just answer the question.”

“All right,” he sighs, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “If you’ve really gotta hear it—it was in San Juan. Skye shot me—while I was in the process of saving her ass, I might add—and left me for dead. Kara was lost without Whitehall to guide her, so I promised to give her some direction if she got me out of there.”

It certainly sounds plausible, but…it’s not enough. Whether true or false, it proves nothing.

If it’s true, well, of _course_ Fitz would’ve told her about Skye nearly killing Ward. He must’ve—the whole team must’ve—been bursting with pride for it. And if it’s false, well, it’s _Ward_. Why wouldn’t he lie?

The frustration of it all wakes her.

 

…

 

Over the next few days, Jemma gathers what intelligence she can about Ward and his interactions with the team while she was gone.

He did indeed save Skye in San Juan—in a manner of speaking, as Skye points out; apparently he kidnapped her and got her into trouble in the first place, which is how she ended up with her strange new powers—and Skye did shoot him and leave him for dead. Agent 33’s name really was Kara…and she and Ward were living in Mexico, to which _Dahlia coccinea_ is native, when Coulson turned to them in SHIELD’s hour of need.

And Fitz, when indirectly questioned, admits that after the first day of sharing memories from the Academy with her, he resorted to reading _Harry Potter_ aloud to her. He doesn’t mention Ward at all…but that _doesn’t mean_ he didn’t then.

He must have. He _must_ have.

Because if he didn’t…if he didn’t, the only other explanation is that she’s been somehow sharing dreams with the actual Ward. Which would mean that she _actually had sex_ with _Grant Ward_.

And that, Jemma simply refuses to accept.

Still, the uncertainty nags at her. She’s a scientist to her bones; a theory, once considered, _needs_ to be investigated—and yet how can she investigate _this_? Walk up to Ward and ask him whether he’s been dreaming about her lately? Just the thought makes her want to hide under her bed.

It’s all quite a muddle—which is why she’s happy to agree to Daisy’s suggestion of a girl’s night. It’s Taco Tuesday at the team’s favorite Mexican restaurant, and though Jemma isn’t well enough yet to take advantage of their bottomless margaritas, she thinks she’s finally emotionally ready to face a crowded public space again.

(And if not, maybe a nice little public breakdown will keep her from dreaming of Ward. She hasn’t since the night she asked about how he met Kara, and she’s dreading facing him—real or not—again.)

(But he’s not real, of course.)

 

…

 

The girl’s night is all going very well, right up to the moment when Jemma quite literally bumps into Luis Ortilla on her way back from the loo.

“Oh, shit,” Ortilla—one of Ward’s top specialists, who has caused the team no end of trouble lately—says when he recognizes her.

(They’ve never met, of course, but Ward is an annoyingly decent strategist. No doubt he’s ensured that all of his people are familiar with the whole team, just as the team has made sure that Jemma is familiar with Ward’s people.)

“Quite,” Jemma agrees.

He snorts. “‘Quite’? Seriously?”

Jemma shrugs, unashamed.

“I’m too drunk for this,” he says, rubbing a hand over his head. His eyes drift over her shoulder, then snap back to her. “Tell you what. I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me. Everyone goes home alive and uninjured.”

It’s an excellent suggestion. The restaurant is packed (enough so that Jemma’s been fighting panic; her trip to the loo was more about catching her breath than anything else) with innocent people, and if Bobbi and Daisy see him…well. She shudders to imagine.

So, really, she should agree and walk away. Pretend this never happened.

But finally, _finally_ , she has an opportunity to experiment. To find out, once and for all, whether her dreams are truly just that.

So when Ortilla starts to walk away, she snags his sleeve. “No.”

“No?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. “You want me to kill you, your friends, and some of these nice innocent people, doc?”

“No,” she repeats. “I just want you to give Ward a message for me.”

“Oh boy.” He looks nervous. “It’s not a severed head, is it?”

“…What? No!”

“Oh good,” he says, miming wiping sweat off his brow. “Because I really hate it when that happens.”

…Is he suggesting that people _often_ send Ward severed heads? Because that—no. No, she can’t get distracted here.

So Jemma shakes off her horrified fascination, squares her shoulders, and looks Ortilla straight in the eye. “Tell Ward that—”

Here she falters, because what _can_ she say? She needs something simple but unmistakable; something that, if Ward _is_ sharing dreams with her, will tip him off—and if he isn’t, won’t cause any harm or (perhaps most importantly) tip him off that she’s dreaming about him on a semi-regular basis.

Her mind races, races, and hits on just the thing.

“—that he has horrible taste in magnets,” she decides.

Ortilla stares at her. “He…what?”

“Has horrible taste in magnets,” she repeats, and pats him on the arm. “He’ll understand.”

Or not. She really, really hopes for _not_.

 

…

 

The next morning, she’s horrified. Those few sips she had of Daisy’s margarita obviously went _straight_ to her head—why else would she have (potentially) tipped Ward off that the dreams they’re sharing are _real_?

If they actually are sharing dreams, she just handed him an unbelievable advantage—and it didn’t even _get_ her anything! Of _course_ when she next dreams of Ward he’ll react to her message, that’s how dreams _work_. Jemma is an absolute moron and the only one who’s gained anything from this is Ward.

Whether he’s gained an advantage or some confusion, only time will tell.

 

…

 

“My taste in magnets is just fine,” Ward says that night. They’re back in the bedroom, in the _bed_ , cuddled together like they never left.

“Your taste in magnets is like every tourist trap in the southern United States was sick on your fridge,” she contests.

He laughs and rolls her beneath him. “This is real.”

“Is it?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, and kisses her deeply. (Even with the fear that he’s right, that this is actually Grant bloody Ward, murderous traitor, on top of her, she’s helpless not to return it.) “Very real.”

“So what?” she asks, around the moan that rises in her throat as he mouths his way down her neck. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sure it does.” He murmurs it into her skin, pairing the words with a bite to the swell of her breast. “It means you’re _mine_ , Jemma—and no alien god is gonna take you away from me.”

“Alien _what_?”

“Forget it,” he says, and it’s no time at all before, under the onslaught of his hands and his tongue and…other parts, she really has.

 

…

 

It comes back to her two days later, when SHIELD receives footage of a strange Inhuman eating people alive at an office building in Connecticut. It’s only the third briefing Jemma’s been allowed into since her return; when she sees the face on the screen, she rather wishes she was still in recovery.

Daisy is saying something about running facial recognition when Jemma finds her voice.

“That’s unnecessary,” she says. She thinks she sounds fairly calm, but perhaps she’s only deluding herself; the rest of the team appears somewhat alarmed.

“Do you know him, Simmons?” Coulson asks, very gently.

“The body belongs to—” She pauses, swallows, forces herself to speak the name. “W-Will Daniels.”

“The…body belongs to?” Daisy echoes. “Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

The story comes spilling out then—everything she hasn’t told them, about Will and It and that awful, awful day when the only hope she’d found in hell was stolen from her. Fitz holds her hand throughout, which would make Will happy but only makes Jemma feel like the worst sort of traitor.

 _His name is like your favorite word_ , Will said to her once, and now Jemma’s gone months without even being able to _speak_ his. Only necessity has forced her into voicing it.

Will deserved better than that.

When her story’s done—when all the blanks of her time on the other planet have been filled in—Coulson’s office is silent. No one, it seems, knows how to respond to the truth.

And Jemma feels horribly claustrophobic.

“Excuse me,” she says, detangling her hand from Fitz’s.

Then she flees.

 

…

 

She doesn’t make it far. Just to the tiny park a few blocks away from the Playground. It’s not much—a swing set, a slide, a few trees, and a bench—but it’s better than the bare brick and concrete of Coulson’s office.

Besides, it’s a sunny day. She still hasn’t got used to having those again.

She doesn’t know how long she spends there, sitting on a bench and enjoying the sun and trying not to think, before someone settles down next to her. She doesn’t know who she’s expecting, precisely—would Coulson come himself? Daisy? Fitz?—but any of her potential guesses would be wrong.

It’s not a member of the team she finds when she opens her eyes.

It’s Ward.

“So,” he says as she tries to recover from the shock. “How ’bout those dreams?”

Damn. Damn damn damn…and that’s where Jemma’s horror runs out. Compared to the revelation in Coulson’s office (that _monster_ followed her back, Will’s body made it back to Earth but _he’s not in it_ ), the truth that she’s been sharing dreams with Ward just doesn’t stack up.

Still. It’s not a good thing that _he_ knows.

“Dreams?” she asks, attempting confusion—but she’s still too rattled to lie, and Ward’s sideways look says he’s embarrassed for her. Fine, then; she supposes playing dumb was always a fool’s hope. “How did this even _happen_?”

“Got me,” he says with a careless shrug. “Does it matter?”

Jemma levels him with her most unimpressed look; to her annoyance, it only makes him smile.

“Of course you think it does,” he says, far too fondly. “I’ll put some of my people on it.”

“Oh, will you,” she mutters.

“Not Ortilla, though,” he goes on. “He’s already traumatized enough from the magnet thing.”

She absolutely _refuses_ to be embarrassed by the memory. Refuses. “They truly were hideous.”

“Eh.” Ward shrugs. “Kara liked them.”

Her breath catches. The casual reference unsettles her…but more than that, it reminds her.

“You knew,” she says. “That It was here.”

“Yeah,” he says, expression much too apologetic for Jemma’s comfort. “There’s another branch of Hydra that worships the thing. They brought it back somehow.” He rests a hand on her thigh, heavy with intent that she can’t quite read. “I met it last week.”

“Did you,” she says faintly.

“It wants you, Jemma,” he tells her, and whether it’s the substance of his sentence or the use of her first name that jolts her so, she doesn’t know.

No, it must be the name. Because she can’t have heard the sentence correctly.

“It—it what?”

“Wants you,” he repeats. “Called you Its.”

Jemma shudders.

“I won’t let it get you,” Ward promises fiercely, tugging her into his side. “You’ll never have to see it again, okay? I promise.”

She wants desperately to make a bitter comment about just how much his promises are worth—something cutting, something that will _hurt_ , will distance her from the comfort of his arm around her shoulders—but she just can’t bring one to mind.

The monster that killed Will, that tormented her for weeks, _wants_ her. How? Why?

“I’ll keep you safe,” Ward says, and the kiss to her temple he follows it with finally spurs her to her feet and away from him.

“No,” she snaps. “No, the _team_ will keep me safe. _You_ are a murderer and a traitor and—”

“And we’ve had a _lot_ of sex recently,” he interrupts. He’s annoyingly casual, lounging with his legs stretched out in front of him and his arms draped across the back of the bench.

Jemma flushes. “That was _just a dream_.”

“Four dreams, actually,” he points out helpfully.

“My point is,” she grits out, “it wasn’t real.”

Ward opens his mouth—to contest that, she’s sure—but she’s remembering something else, something that got lost in the heat of the moment.

“And I am _not_. _yours._ ”

His mouth snaps shut, and he gives her a long look. She’s tense, waiting for a smarmy comment—perhaps how she didn’t seem to mind the concept when his head was between her thighs, or something similarly lewd—but he only shakes his head.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re still grieving; I get it. I can wait.”

“You’ll be waiting a long bloody—”

“And you can stay with the team if you really want,” he goes on like she hasn’t spoken. “I’m not gonna kidnap you.”

…Well that doesn’t sound like him at all. “Really?”

“Really,” he says, and has the gall to look hurt by her surprise. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Jemma. Not after what you’ve been through.”

Jemma…does not know how to respond to that.

“There has to be a catch here,” she settles on.

“No catch,” he promises, standing. “Just a simple question.”

“What sort of question?” she asks suspiciously.

“Tell me, sweetheart.” His hands land on her hips, pulling her in close before she realizes she should stop him. “Did I or did I not make you feel more in a handful of dreams than the rest of the team has, combined, since you came back?”

Her mouth goes dry.

It’s true; he has. Anger, sympathy, passion—in the emptiness of her grief, it was her time with Ward that started her feeling again. While she was shrinking away from the team’s expectations, she was rolling her eyes and even throwing things at Ward.

But he’s infuriating. It doesn’t mean anything.

“When I lost Kara, it felt like the end of the world,” he murmurs. “You helped me move on, Jemma—and I’m gonna do the same for you. Just give it time.” He presses a brief, warm kiss to her forehead, then steps back. “See you soon.”

He’s several feet away, nearly to the park’s entrance, when Jemma finally finds her voice. “What if you don’t?”

“I will,” he says over his shoulder, all arrogant self-assurance. “You can hide in the Playground if you want—hell, I’d prefer it, all things considered—but you can’t hide from our dreams, sweetheart.”

To that, Jemma has no rebuttal, and no choice but to watch him walk away.

…No. Not no choice. She’s _happy_ to watch him walk away. He’s leaving her alone. That’s a _good thing_.

The sudden chill she’s feeling, it’s nothing at all to do with his departure. It’s only because there’s a cloud passing over the sun.

That’s all.

 

…

 

That night, she dreams they're in the hotel room again.

She doesn’t push him away.


End file.
